Hague Gneiss: Kinzigite, Up Close by Ron Schott

This macroGigaPan was shot in the field at the very accessible roadcut of Hague Gneiss seen in this wider view:

Geologically this is a textbook example of a kinzigite - a type of metasedimentary gneiss rich in biotite and garnet. There are also some very large augen cored by feldspar near the lower right portion of the GigaPan that have asymmetric tails which indicate the sense of shear during the ductile deformation of this outcrop.

Form a photography standpoint, what's a little bit unique about this macroGigaPan is that I shot it with my camera set in full Auto mode. In fact, I walked away from this 528 shot image and let the GigaPan robot and camera work entirely without supervision - something I very rarely do.

It's not unusual for me to set the camera in autofocus mode when shooting macroGigaPans, since it is very hard to achieve well focused results at relatively short focal distances combined with a somewhat rough and undulating surface. I was fortunate that only one frame failed to properly focus (top, right of center). If I had monitored the progress of the image I might have caught this failure to focus and reshot the offending frame.

What is truly unusual, though, is that I did not fix the exposure. With many panoramas - particularly landscapes - this would be a recipe for a pretty ugly patchwork of photos that show vastly different exposures and obvious transitions where the individual images are stitched. However, in this case there was no dramatic contrast in exposures - rather it was a partly cloudy day and the light was variable, but not sharply contrasting. Rather than fixing the exposure as I normally would, I left the camera in control. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the results.